Cultural Studies and Languages Faculty

Barbara Alfano brings a background in journalism, translation, and short-story writing in Italian to her study of 20th- and 21st-century Italian fiction.

A scholar of contemporary Spanish fiction, Sarah D. Harris's research and teaching interests include sequential art, twentieth and twenty-first century Peninsular film, trauma, collective memory and forgetting, migration, monstrosity, and gender and identity studies.

Ginger Lin, a native of Taiwan, has 30 years of experience teaching at the cross-section of language, literature, history, and philosophy.

Jonathan Pitcher is a scholar of Latin American literature, philosophy, and history whose research interests exceed any one discipline: identity, exile, film, politics, travel, art, architectural ideology, puppetry, and the aftermath of the Boom, to name a few.

Noëlle Rouxel-Cubberly teaches French language through the lenses of French film, historical correspondence, and other aspects of French cultural life.

Stephen Shapiro’s research on early-modern French literature and culture focuses on aristocratic memoirs, the history of sexuality, culinary culture, and the history of the city of Paris. He is currently looking at the development of a modern gay culture in 18th-century Paris.

Ikuko Yoshida teaches Japanese language and culture, and her research interest areas are second language acquisition, pedagogy, critical thinking in foreign language learning, technology, and Japanese aesthetics. She is a certified instructor of ikebana—traditional Japanese flower arrangement.

Leah Pappas is a documentary linguist who collaborates with language communities in Indonesia. She researches language and gesture to understand how socially-mediated interaction with the environment results in linguistic diversity.

A poet and a scholar of contemporary Latin American Literature and Culture, Lena Retamoso Urbano's research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century Latin American and Spanish poetry, Transnational surrealism, 20th century Latin American narrative, intertextuality, and Queer theory.

Maboula Soumahoro is a French scholar and writer whose work focuses on US and African-American studies, the African diaspora (Black Atlantic).